219. Magic At Work: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

Magic At Work 

Magic in one form or another had always appealed to professional school authorities as 
the means to manage students. Horace Mann, as you know, dedicated his entire Sixth 
Report to a paean in praise of phrenology, the "science" of reading head bumps, and 
every major schoolman from Mann to G. Stanley Hall and John Dewey was a serious 
phrenologist — long after the craze had vanished from upper-class drawing rooms and 
salons. That should tell you something important about the inner itches of these men, I 
think. The quest for certainty in a confusing new land without rules was as much the 
religion of our founding schoolmen as searching one's family for signs of reprobation 



had been for Puritans. But modern schoolmen needed a scientific cast over their 
religiosity, times having changed. 

Early educational psychologists scientized the practice of manipulation behind a common 
expression of modern pedagogy — "motivation." Book after book advised pedagogues 
how to "motivate" charges with technical advice based on an underlying premise that 
young people did not want to learn and had to be tricked into it, a premise which on the 
face of common experience was absurd. As the significance of Bernays' arguments 
penetrated the high command of government and industry, so too did manipulation 
become sine qua non in classroom teaching, the standard by which teacher quality was 
measured. 

But the methods of Bernays or of educational psychologists like Dewey, Munsterberg, 
Judd, Hall, Cattell, Terman, Thorndike, Goddard, and Watson which so radically 
transformed the shape of twentieth-century schooling are about indoctrination 
strategies — building and using psychological tools to create compliant children. If nature 
hadn't cooperated by actually making empty children, then schooling would have to do 
the job. And yet, for what grand purpose children had to be emptied, not many knew. For 
those without religious training or ignorant of the evolutionary sciences, it made only the 
bleakest sort of sense. 

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